Kang Jiyoung World - Your international source everything about Jiyoung!

Kang Jiyoung, born in Paju (Gyeonggi-do), South Korea at January 18, 1994. Kang Jiyoung is the youngest between her other two sisters. In 2008, with only 14 years old, Jiyoung debuted as singer and maknae of the girl group KARA. After 5 years, Jiyoung decided to leave KARA and after a few months living in London she signed a contract with SweetPower to debut, now as actress, in Japan.

Biography:
KARA debuted in 2007 with four members: Kim Sunghee, Park Gyuri, Jung Nicole and Han Seungyeon. But at the end of 2007, Sunghee departed from the group for personal reasons. Jiyoung joined Kara on it’s second formation, with Goo Hara. In July 2008 the group released their first mini album ‘Rock U’.Different from the debut album, Rock U gave Kara a pretty and cute look.

As maknae, Jiyoung was always looking fresh and cute on the concepts and also in variety shows. But her image changed after Kara’s mini album ‘Pandora’. With a strong and sexy concept, Jiyoung went from a girl to a woman. This new image followed Jiyoung until the album ‘Full Bloom’, her last work as a Kara member.

On January, 2014 was announced that Jiyoung was going to leave the group, after 5 years as member. After her contract with DSP ended in April, 2014 Jiyoung left Korea and went to London to study english and acting. In August, 2014 rumours about Jiyoung signing with a japanese agency started to run. Finally on the 21th, japanese media confirmed that Jiyoung had signed with the agency SweetPower and was going to make her first appearence after leaving Kara at the 19th Tokyo Girls Collection on September 6.

Her first job as actress in Japan was in the live action Hell Teacher Nube, as Yukime. With this job, Jiyoung got her first nomination to an award as supporting actress at the 83rd Drama Academy Awards. Jiyoung also gave life to the forensic researcher Kaoruko Nagami on Higanbana. But only TV wasn’t enough, Jiyoung was confirmed in her first movie, the live action Assassination Classroom. In this movie Jiyoung will be Irina Jelavić and her languages skills were really important for her to get the part. Along with her actress job, Jiyoung also became a regular face in a lot of japanese magazines. In only 4 months, Jiyoung was in 30 magazines, including some covers and she also became a regular model at Non-No Magazine. But the main point of her model career was the release of her first photobook Jiyoung Story. The photobook is a collection of photos telling the story of the life transition from a girl to a woman.

In 2015 Assassination Classroom, her first movie reached the top of the japanese theaters and even went overseas. In July of that year Jiyoung announced her second drama "Tamiou" where she would give life to Murano Erika. Also Jiyoung announced that she was going to release in August her first Stylebook called "Grow Up", the stylebook took one year of work and Jiyoung was 100% related to the production and direction of this project.